A Harvest Of New Fiction

David Kipen, Book Review Editor

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 30, 1998

Between Labor Day and Thanksgiving -- as so often between labor and thanks -- a good seven or eight weeks can go by. In publishing, this narrow window almost always discloses some of the most ambitious new books of the year.

The main reason isn't hard to guess. By September, beach reading has long since hit its high-water mark. Holiday gift books have yet to inundate the stores. For two months, tucked between the paperbacks and the picturebooks, an oasis of decent reading blooms.

What fiction will readers remember the autumn of 1998 for? Philip Roth hopes it'll be "I Married a Communist," his new novel about naming names in the 1950s.

For a narrator, Roth returns to his longtime alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. We first met the young Zuckerman in 1979's "The Ghost Writer," in which he lived out every Jewish boy's guilty fantasy of having sex with someone very much like Anne Frank.

In "I Married a Communist," Zuckerman's own story takes a back seat to that of Ira Ringold, an outsize Newark stevedore turned radio actor. Poor Ira falls under the spell, first of Marxism, and then of Eve Frame, a witchy actress who hates herself for being Jewish, but adores her harp-playing harpy of a daughter. She winds up denouncing Ringold to the world in a book called, naturally, "I Married a Communist." Likely to overshadow the book's literary merits are the correspondences between "I Married a Communist" and Roth's own not very private life. Roth, too, married a classically trained actress, Claire Bloom, who has a musically talented daughter, Anna Steiger, and Bloom wrote a book about their years together called "Leaving a Doll's House."

Seen in this light the book's strangely forked narration, with Zuckerman's voice framing Ringold's story, starts to look like an artful alibi. I'm not Ringold, Roth seems to say. How can I be -- I'm Zuckerman, remember?

The book hits stores around October 6. By then we should have a better idea whether Roth is just using McCarthyism as a smokescreen to smear his ex, or if he's risen above revenge to write an important book about tabloid-obsessed America's roots in the anti-communist hysteria of the '50s. Is Roth really examining the psychology of the witch-hunts, or is he hunting one witch in particular?

Speaking of strife between the sexes, the Atlantic Monthly Press will welcome the fall with novels by a man's man and a man's worst nightmare. Jim Harrison, the highly testosterated author of "Legends of the Fall," has written a sequel to "Dalva" called "The Road Home," while feminist author Fay Weldon ("The Life and Loves of a She-Devil" and the very funny "Life Force") weighs in with "Big Girls Don't Cry."

Crown Books goes from the sublime to the ridiculous in September, offering both "Almost Heaven" by Marianne Wiggins (author of the "Lord of the Flies"-for-girls fable "John Dollar"), and "The Hammer of Eden" by Ken Follett ("The Eye of the Needle"), in which yet another terrorist threatens to set off a man-made earthquake in California. Didn't Alistair MacLean and Lex Luthor already try this?

Crown also has Helen Schulman's novel of the Holocaust, "The Revisionist." Along similar lines, Chronicle has Barbara Hodgson's "The Sensualist," and Doubleday has both Federico Andhazi's "The Anatomist" and, under their Anchor imprint, "The Intuitionist," an ingenious-sounding piece of literary fiction about an elevator inspector. The publishers must be hoping we'll confuse these four with "The Alienist," but the smart money says readers will confuse them with each other instead.

The classy Farrar Straus & Giroux will bring out "The Hours," a novelistic homage to Virginia Woolf from Michael Cunningham ("A Home at the End of the World"), and "A Man in Full," Tom Wolfe's long-awaited, much-retitled follow-up to "The Bonfire of the Vanities," set in Atlanta. Meanwhile, Barbara Kingsolver ventures outside her beloved Southwest for HarperFlamingo's "The Poisonwood Bible," the story of a white family doing missionary work in Africa.

Houghton Mifflin is now one of the last big publishers not owned by an even bigger publisher. In addition to "I Married a Communist," they're releasing "The Evolution of Jane," a Galapagos-set comedy from "Rameau's Niece" author Cathleen Schine.

The illustrious Henry Holt will try to pick up the pieces after boss Michael Naumann's departure to head up the culture ministry of his native Germany. Among several promising titles, they've got a short meta-Western called "Ghost Town" by the undersung Robert Coover, head of the interactive fiction program at Johns Hopkins and author of "The Public Burning" (1977), a magnificent postmodern novel about Richard Nixon and the Rosenbergs.

Pomo fiction of a different kind comes to us from Greg Sarris, the American Indian writer who scored raves a few years back for his novel "Grand Avenue." His "Watermelon Nights" arrives in September from Disney imprint Hyperion, of all places.

Having killed off Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike revisits his other alter ego in "Bech at Bay," from Knopf. Where Rabbit represented who Updike might be if he hadn't been a writer, Bech is who he'd be if he weren't a WASP. The answer? A neurotic Jewish novelist who might just have an invitation to Stockholm from the Swedish Academy of Arts and Letters in his future. Can this one possibly be as funny as Irving Wallace's Nobel thriller "The Prize"?

W.W. Norton, the only employee-owned major publisher in the business, goes nautical this fall with the newest Patrick O'Brian adventure, "The Hundred Days," and "The Voyage of the Narwhal," Andrea Barrett's encore after her award-winning "Ship Fever." Norton's "Cowboys Are My Weakness" author Pam Houston, meanwhile, stays on terra firma with 11 linked stories she calls "Waltzing the Cat."

Random House will try to prove it's still Random House, despite having been bought by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. While office wags put on Conrad Veidt accents and hiss "Where are your papers?" in the elevators, Random's still got new novels from Bay Area local heroes Alice Walker ("By the Light of My Father's Smile") and Ethan Canin ("For Kings and Planets"). Incidentally, the first Chronicle reader to identify the source of the title "For Kings and Planets" will win a copy.

Scribner -- house of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe -- has cleared the decks for September and will publish just one book all month: Stephen King's "Bag of Bones." Will the prestige he's buying outweigh the prestige they're losing? Or might -- they both surprise us? It's not every writer who rates a nod from both Oprah's Book Club and Granta's list of the 20 best American novelists under 40, but Edwidge Danticat ("Eyes, Breath, Memory") has managed it. Danticat's new one, "The Farming of Bones," goes on sale from Soho Press in September.

Meanwhile, Viking has the "Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges." If you've never read Borges, and too many people haven't, now may be your best chance. Discovering the stories of this blind Argentine librarian, who died in 1986, is like unearthing a cache of never-before-seen "Twilight Zone" episodes.

Finally, even an arbitrary, fiction- slanted and unscientific list like this one would be unforgivably incomplete without some mention of "At Home in the World" (Picador), Joyce Maynard's memoir of the nine months she spent corresponding and then playing house with J.D. Salinger in 1972. The big revelation here seems to be that Salinger was heavily into homeopathic medicine, something readers of Ron Rosenbaum's brilliant Esquire piece on Salinger last year already knew. Still, there's something to be said for a celebrity kiss-and-tell book that doesn't make its subject out to be a homosexual or a sociopath, just an avowed homeopath.